World Debt

I know I’m a little stale with posting comment on this article (I’m trying to catch up on a number of things, blogging being one of them), but I still wanted to post this for the community that follow Excited Delirium.

I’m a visual person and I found this graphic (warning:  PDF) and summary of creditors and debtors to be the most compelling piece of information associated with this article.

Quickly, the list of debtors are the following:  North America, South America (except Venezuela), Central America, Australia, the Caribbean (except Trinidad & Tobago), Europe (except Luxembourg and Ireland), and most of Asia and Africa.  Summary:  most of the ‘developed’ countries of the world.

With the exemption of a couple of obvious lenders (eg. Luxembourg), the countries that are net creditors seem to fall into three categories:

• Social democracy (eg. Norway)
• Dictatorship
• Oil country (eg. UAE, Oman)

I’m not sure if I’m concerned or inspired by this information.

On one hand, it’s the socialist countries that seem to be doing the best job of pulling themselves out of the debt trap.  They’ve avoided making themselves whores to the lenders of the world, creating a sense of autonomy, and are making efforts to move forward into the future.

Those countries are few.

The more abundant lenders are unstable economies with leaders who have questionable ethics and moral centres.  Are these really the people we want to be indebted to?